braiding, memory, and the landscape of a simple vacation

On Friday, setting down the yoke of daily deadlines, I turned from work and toward my own vacation.

It was easier than I thought, this transition. I didn’t worry much about what would happen while away or what might be lurking in my email inbox when I returned. I slipped silently into the promise that whatever lessons awaken from this absence, I intend to receive with grace.

And now I stay home.

No travel. No adventures. No expectations.

Waiting for me is time. Time with my daughter as she prepares to shoulder the yoke of another school year. Time to sit outside and allow the trees to remind me who I am.

There are books to be read, notebooks and pens waiting to marry. There is grass I have decided to walk barefoot through rather than mow. Tasks unfold in their own time instead of wedging into an exhausted weeknight.

“Hold out your hands and let me lay upon them a sheaf of freshly picked sweetgrass, loose and flowing, like newly washed hair.”

As I read the first chapter, my child, 16 years now, asks if I will brush and braid her dampened hair. She offers her locks to my palms and stands patiently before me as I twist shimmering strands into place.

In these hands I hold memories of hours of brushing and braiding. This girl has always sat without complaint as I brushed out the leaves and sticks and petals that inevitably traveled with her, clinging like offerings to the hair that tumbled to her waist.

I remind her that her hair is like spun chocolate. She reminds me that mine is spun gold. We laugh at this ritual of language that pairs with the physical ritual of braiding. She has brushed and braided my hair as well over the years, her designs growing more intricate and elaborate along with the imaginings of her remarkable mind.

I consider, for a moment, how her father enjoyed braiding her hair too — pulling firmly so the finished braid read like an accomplishment. The result mimicked a sailor’s rigging, perhaps. Or rope worthy of rappelling from a tower. He would show off his effort and declare “a nice, tight braid.”

It occurs to me that he never braided my hair, or brushed it, and I wonder if this was a harbinger of our eventual divorce. I consider briefly how his gaze was captured by other enchantments, laid upon the palm of his hand. Or perhaps it was that my hair defies tightness. It is perpetually loosening, slipping all bonds to become, again and again, undone, and therefore … unsatisfying.

These thoughts are probably unfair, and they pass quickly through my mind. Perhaps hair braiding rests firmly in the domain of women (or parents) at least in my cultural memory. No matter.

What matters is this:

I am still welcome at the ritual of braiding my child’s hair.

I can still become captivated by the first sentence of a book.

I can love my job and still drift unapologetically over a new landscape that unfurls itself before me. I slip the bonds of work and linger in this place called “time away.”